Newcastle United will this year recoup up to and above £10m from the past sales of some of its big-name players, but it has all been pledged to the bank.

On 30 June last year, Newcastle's balance sheet showed their overdraft at Barclays Bank had leapt from less than £13m in 2008 to a whopping £47.87m by the end of their 2008-09 relegation season. Few lenders would be prepared to sustain this level of unsecured exposure to a Championship club and it appears Barclays took steps to reduce it.

The following day, 1 July, a mortgage was registered assigning St James' Park, the club's training ground and academy centre to the bank, as well as all their intellectual property such as brand names and even Newcastle's "trade secrets", whatever they may be.

In October Newcastle went further, with a secured loan that charged a number of deferred transfer-fee receipts, and this is what will really affect the club's cashflow. Among the items hocked is a £3,983,333 payment due from Aston Villa for James Milner on 29 August this year and two €1.68m (£1.4m) instalments from Wolfsburg for Obafemi Martins, the first on 31 August this year and the other a year later.

Newcastle would already have received £3.25m from Wigan Athletic for Charles N'Zogbia in January this year and another €950,000 (£796,500) for David Rozehnal from Lazio. It means Newcastle have borrowed against a total of £10.8m in transfer fees between this January and next August, ensuring the pain of relegation endures even after promotion back to the Premier League.

Luc who's talking

The Club Brugge fan Jean-Luc Dehaene will be the enforcer of Uefa's new financial fair-play laws that were rubberstamped last Friday, and he faces a tough task in policing them. A former prime minister of Belgium, his Club Financial Control Panel must even monitor the value of sponsorship deals to stop wealthy owners using their other companies to avoid rules preventing excessive shareholder subsidy of clubs.

Dehaene will seek to ensure owners' companies pay market rates, which, given the disparity between Manchester United's £25m-a-year deal and the £3m a year Portsmouth receive, is hardly a simple task. Indeed, contrasting views over the financial fair play rules are set to enliven the Premier League shareholders' meeting tomorrow. The owner-subsidy regulations are deeply unpopular with middle-ranking clubs who fear being frozen out of the Champions League. But the rules were ratified by the European Clubs Association in March and are here to stay.

With that in mind, the rump of Premier League clubs have not forgotten exactly who represented English interests at the ECA meeting. For it is those they identify as the clubs with most to gain: Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool.

FA loses its voice

Fabio Capello's best-laid plans for according the seven discarded England players individual explanations for their exclusion from his World Cup squad were overtaken by modern technology yesterday. In these days of rolling news channels and digital dissemination of information, the identities of those cut from the roster instead emerged piecemeal as agents and clubs informed the media before the Football Association could make its announcement in the round.

Adding to the sense that it had lost control of its own agenda, the FA's website was "experiencing technical difficulties". The Guardian's, meanwhile, manfully stood up to the 65,000 hits its World Cup story generated in only three hours over lunch.

And now the science bit

As Floyd Landis last week accused Lance Armstrong of drugs use – which Armstrong has always denied – plus Landis's own admission of systematic doping returned focus to sport's fight against drugs, a UK university was making a breakthrough in tackling human growth hormone. Due to it being a naturally occurring hormone, injected HGH has hitherto been difficult to identify with certainty. But Professor Richard Holt's team at the University of Southampton have found indicators that, in conjunction with existing tests, could provide failsafe controls for HGH. Digger won't go into detail here about how insulin-like growth factor-1 and type III procollagen are such useful biomarkers, but the journal Clinical Endocrinology assures us the science is sound.